The historical novel

The following essay, which was awarded the Le Bas Prize for 1923, is an attempt to find some relation between historical novels on the one hand and history treated as a study on...

History can only make her pictures and rebuild the past out of the things she can save from a shipwreck; she will piece together just so much of the battle of Agincourt as the s...

Here, then, are the two ways by which history passes into a novel. In the one case it merely gives material that can be woven into story in the same way as a geography-book can...

And yet the bareness of the historical setting of the first section of the book, and the lack of all suggestion of a political background or of any complication of individual is...

They are not pictures of France. Dumas’s eye does not sweep the broad landscape of France, does not see the whole of it. The deep sound of the ocean of peoples does not reverber...

Perhaps the most impressive way of bringing great men into the historical novel, is not the method which makes their lives and careers the central theme of the book at all, dema...

For the novelist therefore it is more important to depict the past as a world different from our own, and to show something of its character and colouring than to map out a part...

The historical novel, then, is one of many ways of treating the past and of wresting from it its secret. Given the facts of Nature a scientist will make one use of them, and wil...